Quick Hits for the Weekend

On Thursday, I was thisclose to buying a ticket to fly to Las Vegas for the Domain Madness finale. If it wasn’t for a trip to New Hampshire in a week, a cross country trip in 3 weeks, followed by a trip to Michigan right after, I would be at The Palms with the Domain Consultant crew.

SES is a great show with a lot of information for developers. If you can make one of the many shows, it’s worth attending. If you can’t afford to pay for the actual show (or if you don’t want to pay), get a free exhibition floor pass and meet with some of the companies that exhibit.

There have been more times in the past 2 weeks than I can ever remember where I started to respond to an ignorant/misinformed/stupid post on a domain forum and ended up deleting my post before hitting submit.

If you own a geodomain – especially if it’s a city, state, or country domain name, you NEED to be in San Diego for the GeoDomain Expo at the end of April. If you want to develop it, there are no better mentors and advisors than those who will be at the Expo (ie Dan, David/Mike, Skip, Jess, Fred, Mark, Sara, Josh, Shaun, Nat). If you are looking to partner (or maybe even sell), these people are your primary targets. I mean, who else are you going to turn to – newspapers? LOL. The agenda should be posted in the next few days, but no matter what the panels are, it’s the informal events that are best.

I am not investing in any .tel domain names. I simply don’t get the concept behind why I would want or need to have a .tel domain name, and if people don’t want/need them, investing in them will probably be a fruitless activity. If I want people to have all of my contact information, I make sure they have it. If someone can’t find my phone number or other contact information quickly, chances are very good that I don’t want that person to have it.

Speaking of .tel, have you noticed that most of the people who talk about alternative TLDs like these (ie mobi, asia, tv…etc) have significant investments in them? I don’t want to be an ambassador for an extension. It shouldn’t be the job of registrants to pump a particular extension.

I was very surprised to hear about Monster Venture Partners closing its doors. This is big news that will impact domainers in more of a trickle down affect, as the company invested in domain names and partnered with companies that own great domain names.

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Hmmm I was surprised as well. I don’t think this is the last of those names by rm. Such incredible properties. Although I have learned when it comes to a name, solid development brings the bucks which is the buzzword nowadays but it’s true. The more I develop, the more ad revenue I make. I think there is a lot more they can do with some of those names which are close to being priceless. They will get there and when they do…wow

Just commenting on the .tel you mention above. I’m a strong follower of dot coms and hardly ever buy any other extensions, until now.

As the owner of a few premium dot tels i have had chance to play around with them and come up with various things i can achieve. Just to put them in a better light here’s what i have found.

Firstly, there is no limit to how many pages you can put on a dot tel. I have made one into a slimmed down job site that is linked from a job website i run. With the dot tel it takes only seconds to post a new job and has enough space to give full job descriptions on each posting. I’m touting this to viewers of my site to use the dot tel when browsing from mobile devices ( faster load time and easier navigation)

Secondly, i have several dot tels that are category defining names of websites i run. I have simply linked back to my websites and notice in the logs several click thrus already.

Thirdly, I know of one person who has sold ten dot tels on the aftermarket. Not for thousands but a decent profit all the same.

Fourthly, dot tel have a deal with myspace and will be selling registrations via the myspace website. With 130 million accounts it could go viral in no time – i’m not risking missing out on dot tels gaining traction and my $100 investment won’t break the bank anyway if they don’t.

Fifthly, they are getting crawled. I did a site:.tel search 4 days ago and 1600 were indexed. That figure is now over 2,600. It’s early days but it looks like google is indexing them nicely

Sixthly, and probably most importantly, dot tel have taken nine years to bring this launch to market and had approx $50 million venture capital to do so. If the dot tel concept never takes off as expected do you think those backers are going to watch their investment go down the pan? of course not. To avert a disaster their first move might be to release the names and allow proper sites to be built on them. If this happens i will be sat on some prime generics that i can do what i like with – they won’t have value like a generic dot com but could match a prime generic info or biz in resale value.

“Speaking of .tel, have you noticed that most of the people who talk about alternative TLDs like these (ie mobi, asia, tv…etc) have significant investments in them? I don’t want to be an ambassador for an extension. It shouldn’t be the job of registrants to pump a particular extension.”

IMO, people who invest in alternative extensions feel the need (or maybe have the need) to be emissaries for the extension.

Good luck convincing a criminal defense attorney that he needs DefenseAttorney.mobi or DefenseAttorney.tel at any price. With DefenseAttorney.com, you wouldn’t need to convince him that he wants it – you can skip the sales pitch and immediately talk about price.

It can be difficult enough convincing end users to buy their category killer .com domain names, which they already know about and most would want without consideration of the price. It’s completely different for alternate extension (aside from .net, .org and maybe .info).

I cannot think of one way that by posting what i did I would benefit me in any way. There is no ulterior motive other than to portray my findings regarding dot tels.

In all fairness, a lot of people read your blog and see your success and try to emulate it. – I know I do with some things. So in my opinion if you say something is not for you, others might follow suit and believe it’s not for them either without bothering to take a second look.

In all honesty dot tels are ugly pages. As a developer of many sites I can see the limitations to them. But all i see people say about dot tels is that they are just for putting up contact details, and why bother when you can list them on your website contact page. This may be true but i have found there’s so much more can be done with them if you think beyond that.

All i’m doing by my above comments was balance out the facts when i could see they were being skewed. If this is having ulterior motives then it certainly isn’t going to benefit me in any way.

I haven’t fallen in love with dot tels, have only invested $100 or so and am not going to buy any more. But playing around with them for the past few days I thought I would simply tell my findings on here where there’s a good community and a bunch of like minded people to myself.

I appreciate your feedback. My fear is that people rush out and register dozens of them to try and capture “the next big thing.” Domain names are not lottery tickets, and had I bought hundreds of domain names – any extension – just because I wanted to make sure I was covered, I would be broke and working at AIG still.

The core premise, was that registrants shouldn’t promote an extension. Your response indicates that as a DOT COM believer and registrant, you promote the DOT COM extension.

I wasn’t making an argument about whether or not people are justified to promote one extension over the other. I was simply pointing out that DOT COM investors promote their extension over other extensions.

DOT COM investors have associations where only DOT COM domain owners are allowed. Some DOT COM owners openly trash other extensions in blogs and message board postings. Switch out DOT COM, with DOT NET, DOT TV, DOT BIZ…..we all do it (at times).

It is natural to promote anything where you feel passioninate about it (or have alot of dollars tied to it).

The problem with many people in the domain industry is that they are stuck in the “what was” or “what is” not “what will be”. Also, they are stuck in the .com only and in English speaking only. The internet is a big world out there and people need to take there blinders off.

These are the same people who told me in 2000, when I registered DescargarMusica.com (Download Music in Spanish) and many other top spanish names
that said it’s a waste of money because the spanish market is dead. What a bunch of idiots. I have received many high offers for this name.

Even though I still have 95% .com if I sold my .tv portfolio
of Spain.tv, Europe.tv, Pornografia.tv, Religion.tv, Espanol.tv, Moscow.tv, Actor.tv of the offers I have gotten,
my ROI would of been 20x of what I paid for them and that includes all premium renewals. Don’t need the money to sell right now. Also, go ahead and go to the spanish domain forum, Demene and you will see Musica.tv just sold for over XXX,XXX on a non-premium name.

As you can see I am a big avocate of .tv and been investing it since 2000 when they came out. I don’t care what people think, it’s all about ROI whether it’s .com or any other extension. In order to be successful you need to take risk and look 3-5 years ahead and look at TRENDS worldwide on the internet. If you are stuck in the English and .com market only, you need to wake up.

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